Joshua Rovner, American University – Strategy and Grand Strategy

What’s your strategy for navigating tricky circumstances?

Joshua Rovner, associate professor in the School of International Service at American University, delves into the difference between strategy and grand strategy.

Joshua Rovner is associate professor of international relations at American University. His most recent book is Strategy and Grand Strategy (International Institute for Strategic Studies, Adelphi Series, 2025).

Strategy and Grand Strategy

The United States has been fighting the war on terrorism since September 11, despite the fact that the war has been deeply frustrating. Why does it persist?

The US is also modernizing its nuclear forces, even though no one has used nuclear weapons since the Second World War. Why does it invest in weapons it will probably never use?

Solving these puzzles requires attention to two concepts: strategy and grand strategy. These terms are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same.

Strategy is a theory of victory. Grand strategy is a theory of security. My research explores how these concepts interact in history and in the present. The results are often surprising – and a little unsettling.

For example, strategic excellence can be counterproductive if wartime strategy serves a deeply flawed grand strategy. Perversely, victory can reinforce misguided ideas about the sources of national security.

In such cases, states are better off losing.

Another finding that military decisions are perplexing in terms of strategy, but they make sense in terms of grand strategy. Take the war on terrorism. Strategy doesn’t help us here, because there is no obvious way of defining victory.

But the point of grand strategy is security, which is a subjective perception, not victory, which requires achieving some specific political goal. So the US can continue military operations to reduce its sense of vulnerability, even if it cannot imagine winning the war.

Similarly, the idea of nuclear strategy seems logically absurd, because no wartime goals could justify the costs of a nuclear strike. But leaders have other reasons for building nuclear forces, including deterrence and allied diplomacy.

These broader purposes support the US theory of security – its grand strategy – even if nuclear attacks are unthinkable in terms of strategy.

Read More:
[Routledge] – Strategy and Grand Strategy